The Kimota Anthology (33 page)

PERPETUAL MOTION

by Julie Travis

Sometimes I think I can read minds.

I look at someone and I get an air of who they are, how they feel, what their life has been like. It’s never anything coherent, just a jumble of pictures and words. There’s nothing to say I’ve ever been right, or that it’s anything more than my imagination, but I like to believe that it’s true.

I wish I could make sense of what I’m seeing now. There is a girl standing at the bottom of the garden. She is startled, like she thought the house was still empty, but there is more. As she looks straight at me I can see an image of a stone slab surrounded by grass and the name
Sarah
, then calmer feelings, the image of a dog. Then the girl turns away, climbs over the back wall, and is gone.

The house I’d rented was small and reminded me of the places we used to stay in on holiday as a child; the wallpaper was yellowed with age and tobacco smoke and ornaments were dotted around to make the place look homely. Everything was old enough to make it look almost quaint, but there was nothing anyone would want to steal. I’d put a few of my own things in the bedroom so I didn’t feel too lost last thing at night or first thing in the morning, but the rest of the place could look like a holiday home for all I cared. That’s possibly all it ever would be. I intended living in the place over the winter; three months to see if I really could - and wanted to - escape the rat race. I had a novel to finish. Don’t we all?

But I was wondering if I’d chosen the right place. The people were dark, moody like the sea. I knew I would not be immediately welcome as an outsider, but it was more than that. It was as if the people were suffering from mass depression, the town itself sickening. I’d seen people sitting on benches by the beach, in tea rooms, looking out at the beautiful harbour, their eyes brimming with tears, as if their world was about to end. Just this morning I’d seen a man crying into his tea in the cafe. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but I didn’t wish to intrude.

When I returned to the house I could see the landlady, Mrs Click, standing outside. She saw me and waved. She, at least, was capable of smiling. As we went indoors I told her about the girl I’d disturbed in the back garden the day I’d moved in. Disapproval crossed her face. The girl was from the Smith family, she told me. The children ‘ran wild’. I hoped I hadn’t made trouble for them.

A week later I was out shopping when I came across the girl. It was raining and she was standing there with her hood down and her coat undone, soaking wet. At first I thought she was looking in the shop window but then I realised she was staring at her own reflection.

“Hello,” I said. “Remember me? You ought to do your coat up.” I was aware that she’d probably been told not to talk to strangers, but she looked strange, disturbed. Without moving, or looking away from her reflection, she spoke.

“I’m going to die,” she said.

“Not for a very long time. Decades and decades. You don’t have to worry about it.” I wasn’t going to patronise her, although as I spoke it struck me that she might be terminally ill.

“No, I’m going to die soon.” She began counting on her fingers. “In four weeks’ time. The twenty-eighth of November.”

She looked at me and smiled. “I don’t have to use the Green Cross Code any more. I don’t have to do my coat up because I won’t catch my death of cold.”

She ran past me, straight out in front of a car. It missed her by inches and as she reached the other kerb a woman strode over to her and shook her arm. I heard her shouting at the girl, asking her if she had a death wish, and to come along,
Sarah
.

I smiled. I suppose I had to be right about something, some time.

Mrs Click had said the children were wild. What she really meant was that one of them at least was very strange. I watched them go. The rain was beginning to get me down. I had been making a real effort with the people here, but they were dour, preoccupied. I went into the bakery and tried once more at conversation. The woman serving me was young and quite astoundingly pretty, the sort that would leave for the city as soon as they were able. We talked but she, too, was unreachable, caught up in her own sadness, her eyes far away. I gave up and went home.

The next day was sunny and nearly warm, so I did some work in the garden. The rent on the house was lower than anywhere else in town, in return for me tidying it up a bit and doing some re-decorating. Despite everything I wanted to stay and make a go of it. Later I walked along the cliff path near the house. It was peaceful there, for once not blowing up a gale. The silence was broken by the sound of a child crying. Behind a clump of bushes was Sarah Smith. She was not alone. There was a figure with her. It bent down toward her in a jerky movement.

“Well, Sarah? Are you pleased? You’re going to die very young. You’re still going to be a virgin when you die. You’ll never grow up, never get married, never have children. Never live.”

The man was grinning at her. There was something unnatural about him. He was wearing a top hat and tails like an undertaker and apart from what he was saying his voice, his whole manner made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. When I’d been at primary school there had been several attempted abductions of children and we’d been shown a video to scare us into keeping away from strangers. This man reminded me of the bogeyman on the video. He was torturing the girl quite flippantly, casually putting horrible thoughts into her head, for the fun of it, it seemed.

“But I want to get old, like my nan,” cried Sarah.

The figure jerked itself upright and gave a shrill laugh. Then he turned on his heels and walked away, his stick-thin arms and legs bending and flailing. The figure frightened me. He was like something from a nightmare. I thought to comfort Sarah but followed the man instead. At first it looked as if he was heading towards Sarah’s house but he went instead to the waste ground that ran along the cliff top. The row of houses that stood there had been bombed in the second world war. The area had been walled off, and never made safe. A small wooden door was set into the wall. The figure took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and went in. As he made to shut it, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then to my horror he stopped, swung the door open and jerked his head around to look me full in the face. After what seemed an eternity, he slammed the door shut, locking it noisily behind him.

I walked back on shaky legs to find Sarah, but she was gone.

On the 28th of November Sarah Smith died.

I didn’t find out until the day of the funeral. As a newcomer, I suppose I was not on the town’s grapevine. One morning, a few weeks after my encounter with the thin man on the cliff top, Mrs Click appeared at my door, dressed in black. I owed her some rent, so I reached for my cheque book but she shook her head, began to cry and said she couldn’t think of such things at a time like this.

Sarah had been hit by a car and had died before reaching hospital. I remembered the conversation I’d had with her. The thin man had convinced her that she would die on that day. Did having that date in her mind make it happen, make her feel like it wasn’t worth taking care because she couldn’t stop it? It could have been just a bizarre coincidence. Or someone could have made sure it happened on November 28th. Had the thin man not been teasing her, but telling her what he was planning to do?

I gave Mrs Click my condolences but told her that I hadn’t known Sarah, so I wouldn’t be going to the funeral. Later I changed my mind and went to the cemetery. I kept my distance from the knot of mourners and walked the narrow paths around the edge of the grounds. I watched the graveside ceremony and wondered who I could talk to about the figure on the cliff top.

I spied movement on the path ahead of me. It was the young woman from the bakery. She was tending a grave, brushing leaves away. She crouched silently, looking at the headstone, then got up and walked towards me. I gave a nod of acknowledgment but her eyes were glazed over and she didn’t notice me. As she rejoined the mourners I thought I should pay my respects, and approached the group. I recognised Sarah Smith’s mother and struggled for something to say.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” was all I could manage. It was inadequate, a platitude.

“What will be, will be,” she replied. “We can all get on now. And she’s at peace. She has nothing to fear any more.”

The remark sounded cold, callous even, although I knew better than to judge someone who was grieving. Mrs Click was standing nearby at her husband’s grave. I asked her who had been driving the car that had killed Sarah.

“It was John Tooley. He’s a farmer from outside town. He’s in a terrible state, poor man.”

“Is he tall, very thin, dresses in black, seems a bit.... well, mad? It’s just that I saw him talk to Sarah a while back and it was almost as if he was threatening her.” It was a bad time to ask, but I had to know.

But Mrs Click did not reply. She was staring at me, horrified, crossing herself.

“That devil, that devil,” she muttered.

The next day Mrs Click came to the house and said she was cancelling the lease. She was friendly, overly so, and said her daughter’s family were moving back to the area and so she would need the house for them. It was obvious she was lying, but I knew I had little in the way of rights and I wanted no ill-feeling. I asked her if she knew of anywhere else I could stay.

She looked at me and spoke softly but firmly. “Why don’t you go back to London, Molly? This is not the sort of place you want to get stuck in.” She clearly wanted me gone.

After, I went to the bakery and told the young woman, Elizabeth, that I needed to talk to her about Sarah Smith. Over lunch I told her about what I’d seen on the cliff top and Mrs Click’s strange reaction to it. Elizabeth shuddered, and I thought she was going to get up and leave. I asked her if she knew who he was.

She began to talk, to ramble and I thought that she must be insane. She said the man was the Grim Reaper, and only God could help me now. She spoke of a door somewhere in the town that led down into Hell. In the middle ages the locals had found it and sealed it shut, but a year later the man I’d seen, who was known as the Stonemason, had hammered the door open and had been punishing the townspeople ever since.

I shrugged it off but Elizabeth shook her head, eyeing me carefully. I relented. I asked her to tell me more of the story.

The Stonemason was working for the witches that used to live in the town. He made people’s headstones and sneaked into the graveyard at night to put them up. People never knew when theirs would appear, but they grew up knowing that one day they would know the date of their own death. Sometimes it was a few weeks away, sometimes years or decades in the future. But the stones were never wrong.

I decided to go along with it. “But everyone dies. What would it matter?”

“No one really believes they’re going to die. You don’t, no one does. Can you imagine what it feels like to come face to face with your own grave? To know that the date on it is the date you
will
die? It’s a burden, a terrible burden to carry around. People tend their own graves. They eat, breathe and sleep death.”

The woman was terrified; it was pouring out of her. It was more than belief in a story, or old fashioned superstition. She had seen her own grave.

It had been there for years, generations, she said. “My grandfather found it before he was married. Before my mother was even born he knew when I was going to be born and he knew when I was going to die. I’ve known since I was ten. It’s cruel. It’s made the whole of my life pointless. I have to go now, I’m due back at work.”

I let her go and stayed in the cafe, thinking. Elizabeth certainly believed the story, what she had seen, completely. It had to be folklore, but someone - the thin man - was using it for his own ends and the whole town was wrapped up in a sick prank, the victims of a bizarre conman.

I was back in the cemetery. I had gone first to the library and found a book of local history. The story was there. It said the town had been rife with witches and the locals, while hunting them out, had found a door which they believed evil spirits were using to infiltrate the town and possess the people. The Stonemason was a demented figure ordered up from Hell to “reside in the town until all were dead or driven to melancholy by the fact of knowing when they and their loved ones were to die”. The story was fascinating and I was happily lost in it until I turned the page and saw a reproduction of a woodcut of the Stonemason. It was the image, the exact image of the man I’d seen talking to Sarah Smith.

Seeing the illustration disturbed me and I went to the cemetery to see if Elizabeth’s grave was there. I also remembered that the thin man - the Stonemason - had a key to the bomb site on the cliff tops. I would go there again later - if there was any evidence of him living there I would go straight to the police.

The cemetery was old and picturesque, a typical country graveyard. I re-traced my steps to where I’d seen Elizabeth, wandered around for a short time and then I was suddenly looking at Elizabeth Martin’s grave. It was a shocking, disorientating sight. The stone was old, worn away in parts, with moss on one side. There was a photograph of a middle aged woman on it, an older, future Elizabeth. It all seemed so believable. No wonder the woman was in such despair. She was grieving her own death.

It was beyond me why someone would go to so much trouble just to make Elizabeth’s - and the other townspeople’s - lives a misery. There was a nagging feeling now that the answer was not simple. What if it were all true? I shook the thought away and carried on through the cemetery. I was nervous and jumping at the sound of the wind rustling the trees. To my relief the rest of the graves were normal, but I had no answers to my questions.

I made my way to the footpath that began in the fields behind Sarah’s house and led along the cliff top. The wind was fresher here and I zipped my coat up around my neck. As I approached the bomb site I left the path and walked to the wall that surrounded it. I did not intend to let myself be seen. As I got to the door I could see that it was open. There was no sign of anyone, so I went in.